• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Feature request -- proportionally spaced fonts!

Matthias99

Diamond Member
This is something that's bothered me occasionally since I joined AT Forums -- there's no good way to get proportionally-spaced fonts in a post. This makes it difficult to create any sort of ASCII-art diagrams or pictures, and impossible to create any completely accurate ones. It's also very difficult to write out code examples when programming questions come up in Highly Technical or Software, since whitespace (other than line breaks) is totally ignored in regular HTML text.

There has been, as of late, a sometimes-unavailable "attach code" option, which sticks a big, ugly text box into the middle of your post with proportionally-spaced text in it. However, there are two major problems with this:

1) It doesn't always seem to be available.
2) You can only have *one* such box, and it has to be at the *end* of your post.

As far as I can tell, all that's needed to enable this is to have tags that parse into the HTML <code> and </code> tags; just about every browser prints such text in a proportional font (such as Courier). This is a simple addition that would make certain things a lot easier to do.
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
This makes it difficult to create any sort of ASCII-art diagrams or pictures, and impossible to create any completely accurate ones.

I'm pretty sure that's the exact reason why we don't have the code tag option.


Originally posted by: Matthias99
1) It doesn't always seem to be available.

It's only available here and in Software which in theory are the only places it's needed.


Originally posted by: Matthias99
As far as I can tell, all that's needed to enable this is to have tags that parse into the HTML <code> and </code> tags; just about every browser prints such text in a proportional font (such as Courier). This is a simple addition that would make certain things a lot easier to do.

I'm sure FuseTalk could add the feature (it may even already have it) but it all boils down to AnandTech wanting to prevent abuse of such an option.
 
Originally posted by: aves2k
Originally posted by: Matthias99
This makes it difficult to create any sort of ASCII-art diagrams or pictures, and impossible to create any completely accurate ones.

I'm pretty sure that's the exact reason why we don't have the code tag option.

Was it previously present and abused, or does AT just have a thing against ASCII art?

Originally posted by: Matthias99
1) It doesn't always seem to be available.

It's only available here and in Software which in theory are the only places it's needed.

In theory. I was trying to draw an accurate bar graph in Video earlier, which is trickier than you'd think without a proportionally spaced font. In any case, having <code> tags would be a much cleaner (and simpler, IMHO) solution than the "Attach Code" thing.
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
In theory. I was trying to draw an accurate bar graph in Video earlier, which is trickier than you'd think without a proportionally spaced font. In any case, having <code> tags would be a much cleaner (and simpler, IMHO) solution than the "Attach Code" thing.

I don't particularly care for the "Attach Code" feature either but it's taken years to even get that much enabled.
 
Back
Top